Help with dealing with a yf's embellishing problem
Submitted by Reason Filled on 2002-09-28 14:37:55, Saturday
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One of my little buddies is almost 9 yo and he lives with his grandparents. His mom is a irresponsible drug user, and his dad lives an hour and a half away and keeps him 2 weekends a month. He kinda reminds me of myself when I was his age. He starves for attention and can be VERY annoying trying to get it. His grandparents are ALWAYS happy when I come take him to the movies or to the go-cart place. Not that they don't love him to death, he just can be a handful sometimes. Anyways, most of his annoying tactics he uses to get attention (like acting VERY hyper and making weird noises) I have no problem with. What bothers me is that he has a trait my cousin had. He embellishes the truth in order to try to make people like him. I mention this because he was doing this in the car all the way to the game I wrote about in the previous post. I had a pack of rubber bands in the back seat, and he saw them and proceeded to ask me if he could take them to the game and shoot them at the cheerleaders. After I looked at him with the "what do you think" look and told him no he started to tell everyone how he went to one game where he was shooting rubber bands at players and even hitting the ball in the air sometimes. He wasn't telling this like a joke, he was telling this as if he expected everyone to believe him. He does this quite often. When I am alone with him, and he does this with me, I stop him and tell him I know that it isn't true. However, when his friends or other people are with us, I feel bad to do that in front of others. I have never really had any kind of "sit down" serious chat with him before, and I don't really know if he is mature enough for that to be effective. The reason it bothers me to see him do this, is because I know it will hurt him in the future. Especially with making friends. I know this because the cousin I mentioned, that also did this, is my age and he still does it, to a lesser extent, today. What would be the best way to help him? Any suggestions? |
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